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Why do you muddle the issue with campaign finance reform? I strongly disagree with your views on that, and even though I agree on stopping mass surveillance I

Why do you muddle the issue with campaign finance reform? I strongly disagree with your views on that, and even though I agree on stopping mass surveillance I can't support your org. As for money in politics - if bloomberg and hillary clinton don't proved that money doesn't just buy votes, I don't know what will. Lastly, anonymous speech is important - you would think people arguing against mass surveillance would understand that.

r3trohack3r 6y ago
This spawned from an observation that our representative democracy isn't representative. We worked backwards from what caused that. We've split the mission out into sub-goals but the primary goal is to make our representatives, well, representative. We identified what, in our opinion, was undermining that and set to work. I don't think it's fair to attach everything to Bloomberg and consider the matter a closed case. Large donors do indeed influence the outcomes of elections, if they didn't we wouldn't have large donors. Conflating money with speech isn't healthy, they can be exchanged for one another. Tracking that exchange as part of campaign financing laws wouldn't constitute a warrantless search while storing the "metadata" of peoples communication very well might. Warrantless searches, and the government organizations wielding them, have been used to systematically disenfranchise and suppress voters. The civil rights movements have been actively undermined by the government wielding this power. I may be operating under an availability heuristic here, but a sweeping majority of the folks I've crossed paths with in my life do not support the government's mass surveillance programs. Yet the persist, being sanctioned and overseen by our "representatives". The mission is cultivated from identifying and disrupting the viscous cycle of power imbalance. The strongest branch of the U.S. government is supposed to be the voters, not the few but the many, we aim to make that happen.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The problem with campaign finance isn't that there's nothing there, it's that everything is there. "Money is speech" isn't a law of the United States, it's a law of physics. Money buys staff and billboards and newspapers and TV stations. Fox News works for the Republicans and CNN works for the Democrats even if neither of them donate a dollar to anybody's campaign. Google can put a banner on google.com that will be seen by the whole world. Counting influence only when it's in cash and not in kind only makes the asymmetry worse. It transfers influence from millionaires who can "only" afford advertising to billionaires who own the media outlets themselves and gain airtime for themselves by not selling it to someone else. But counting third party speech as a political donation because it benefits a political campaign is intractable. The easier problem to solve is to fix the voting system, because there is an uncontroversial and straight forward solution. Switch to range voting or approval voting, which dismantles the two party system. Then, when there are twelve parties in Congress, it's much harder to buy elections with money or airtime because the election winner's original chance of winning was 8% instead of 50%, which makes it much easier to waste your money on a loser and thereby reduces the payoff from spending it that way.
  - r3trohack3r 6y ago
    This is really insightful and powerful feedback. I'm going to spend time, a lot of time, reflecting on this. If you'd like to keep an ongoing dialogue on this, or help in any way, drop a line to staff@everytwoyears.org <3

r3trohack3r 6y ago

This spawned from an observation that our representative democracy isn't representative. We worked backwards from what caused that. We've split the mission out into sub-goals but the primary goal is to make our representatives, well, representative. We identified what, in our opinion, was undermining that and set to work. I don't think it's fair to attach everything to Bloomberg and consider the matter a closed case. Large donors do indeed influence the outcomes of elections, if they didn't we wouldn't have large donors. Conflating money with speech isn't healthy, they can be exchanged for one another. Tracking that exchange as part of campaign financing laws wouldn't constitute a warrantless search while storing the "metadata" of peoples communication very well might. Warrantless searches, and the government organizations wielding them, have been used to systematically disenfranchise and suppress voters. The civil rights movements have been actively undermined by the government wielding this power. I may be operating under an availability heuristic here, but a sweeping majority of the folks I've crossed paths with in my life do not support the government's mass surveillance programs. Yet the persist, being sanctioned and overseen by our "representatives". The mission is cultivated from identifying and disrupting the viscous cycle of power imbalance. The strongest branch of the U.S. government is supposed to be the voters, not the few but the many, we aim to make that happen.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
The problem with campaign finance isn't that there's nothing there, it's that everything is there. "Money is speech" isn't a law of the United States, it's a law of physics. Money buys staff and billboards and newspapers and TV stations. Fox News works for the Republicans and CNN works for the Democrats even if neither of them donate a dollar to anybody's campaign. Google can put a banner on google.com that will be seen by the whole world. Counting influence only when it's in cash and not in kind only makes the asymmetry worse. It transfers influence from millionaires who can "only" afford advertising to billionaires who own the media outlets themselves and gain airtime for themselves by not selling it to someone else. But counting third party speech as a political donation because it benefits a political campaign is intractable. The easier problem to solve is to fix the voting system, because there is an uncontroversial and straight forward solution. Switch to range voting or approval voting, which dismantles the two party system. Then, when there are twelve parties in Congress, it's much harder to buy elections with money or airtime because the election winner's original chance of winning was 8% instead of 50%, which makes it much easier to waste your money on a loser and thereby reduces the payoff from spending it that way.
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  This is really insightful and powerful feedback. I'm going to spend time, a lot of time, reflecting on this. If you'd like to keep an ongoing dialogue on this, or help in any way, drop a line to staff@everytwoyears.org <3